If you’re a person who rushes towards the kitchen or fridge, when feeling down or upset, you’re trying to find comfort in eating food. Yes, many people are used to finding comfort as a way to cope with difficult and sad feelings in eating. Don’t feel shy, you’re not alone.
Many people eat in response to their emotions and the behavior is called Emotional Eating. Studies all show that everyone in their life dies sometimes especially when they are at the verge of chaos.
Your body gets energy from food. The energy is necessary for your survival. This means eating boosts up your mental activity and helps you feel better and cope with the unbearable situation that is disturbing you emotionally. But I should be limited. Unchecked or frequent emotional eating becomes a problem. Although you take it as a solution to your emotional downfall, eating is not the solution to your problem in reality. This means when you are sad, anxious, emotionally down or frightened, eating doesn’t resolve your stressed feelings. No doubt food is the center of your living style. It not only fulfills your energy needs but it’s the party and parcel of your celebrations. You also show your care to someone by making food for them. You also share your food with those who are dear to you. Thus your emotional connection with food is natural. There should be no regret in using food for your comfort.
The important thing is to make wise decisions about how much and what type of food is good for you. You also need to pay attention to the time of eating. Try to find out some other effective ways to cope with your sadness or stress.
What Makes You Eat Emotionally?
There are a lot of things that trigger a desire to eat, especially when you’re emotionally down. However,following factors can promote emotional eating in you:
- Health issues.
- Financial worries.
- Relationship struggles.
- Work stress.
One more thing that compels people to eat more is following a restrictive diet. But some more internal factors that cause it are:
- Inability to manage emotions.
- Lack of introspective awareness.
- Under-active cortisol response to stress.
- Lack of ability to interpret, understand or describe the emotions.
This is an automatic behavior and can become an established habit when you use more food to eat.
Is Emotional Eating an Eating Disorder?
No, this is not categorized as an eating disorder. But studies suggest that it may be a sign of disordered eating that can ultimately approach an eating disorder.
Disordered eating can be recognized by these habits:
- Frequent food restrictions or dieting.
- Feeling guilt or embarrassment after eating food that is unhealthy in your point of view.
- Being very rigid with food choices.
- Eating more in response to emotions rather than physical hunger.
- Labeling food as “good” or “bad”.
- Obsessive thoughts about food.
Research explained that when your eating behavior starts meeting a certain criteria, eating disorders can be diagnosed. In this way people also check if they have any disordered eating behavior but if your behavior doesn’t meet any criteria, you are a normal person without any eating disorder.
Anyhow, if you ever feel that you have disordered eating behaviors, speak to your healthcare provider for further diagnosis.
Why Do You Use Food as Your Emotional Comforter?
People often adopt some habits including emotional eating to cope with their anxiety, stress and depression. Tough situations or hard times of life induce feelings of emptiness or an emotional void in you. Eating is the best way to increase the release of dopamine, a brain hormone making you feel good.
It also becomes a habit. For example, when you often approach your pantry in times of stress or sadness, you always think of food as a sign of confusion in difficult times, without realizing it.
Moreover, food is a legal thing that is available anytime anywhere. So using food to make yourself feel better is easy.
Images and videos related to food and recipes are also a reason to increase the feelings of hunger.
Physical Hunger vs. Emotional Hunger
It is the human instinct that it needs food with its favorite textures and tastes. But sometimes, it becomes difficult for us to differentiate between physical and emotional hunger cues. So, it is tricky to find the difference most of the time. But sometimes, your hunger cue is the combination of both i.e emotional and physical.
In addition, abstaining from food for several hours or generally eating very little in a day causes an increase in the emotional eating feelings.
However, the following hints can help you find the difference between physical and emotions you get.
| Physical Hunger | Emotional Hunger |
| Linked with the last time you ate. | Triggered when you need comfort to get relief from stress. |
| Develops with the passage of time. | Starts anywhere, anytime. |
| After eating, you start feeling full and this is the sign of stop eating. | You never feel full and cannot deny eating random edibles. |
How Can You Know If You’re Emotional Eater?
If you’re an emotional eater. You may experience:
- Food as a calming factor in the times of distress.
- Being out of control around food.
- Powerful emotions urges you to eat more and more.
- You keep eating even when you’re not hungry.
How to Stop Emotional Eating?
If you’re an emotional eater, you will have a tough time when you plan to get rid of this habit. You cannot leave this habit easily, it will take time and effort. This means you can do it with effort. So, if you want to get rid of this habit, look here for some effective tips!
Schedule Your Meals
Emotional eating depends on your eating times and behavioral strategies. When you eat your food at planned times, it helps curb physical hunger that leads to curb emotional hunger too.
According to new research, the cold-hot empathy gap can explain this phenomenon. Researchers have said that when you are not hungry, you show cold or neutral behavior towards food, therefore, you underestimate tahoe hungry you might be in future. Whereas in a hot start, you overestimate your hunger and start emotional eating.
They concluded that CBT with some behavioral strategies is the best option to prevent emotional eating. This is the reason due to which planned means help keep you in a cold or neutral state. This doesn’t mean that you need to plan your meals for a week or more. Instead, you just need to create a weekly meal plan according to your daily and emotional requirements. The list must include foods necessary for breakfast, lunch, snack time game and dinner. This plan also helps you decide which meal should be eaten for more energy gain. For example:
| Day of the Week | Time | Meal |
| Monday to Friday | 07:00 am. | Breakfast |
| Monday to Friday | 10:30 am. | Snack |
| Monday to Friday | 02:00 pm. | Lunch |
| Monday to Friday | 06:00 pm. | Dinner |
| Saturday & Sunday | 09:00 am. | Breakfast |
| Saturday & Sunday | 12:00 pm. | Lunch |
| Saturday & Sunday | 03:00 pm. | Snack |
| Saturday & Sunday | 07:00 pm. | Dinner |
Following this eating schedule helps you control your eating desires that are not according to this time table. When you feel an intense desire to eat something, wait for your next scheduled meal. It may be only a few minutes away. Try to refrain yourself from eating before set time.
Avoiding resting meals too close to bedtime also helps you avoid emotional eating that usually leads to weight gain. Try to keep all your meals within a 12-hour window. For example between 8:00 am. To 08:00 pm. Hence you can eat a meal about every three hours.
Add Physical Movements
Stress and anxiety are major causes of eating emotionally while incorporating certain physical movements to your daily routine is the best way to manage stress and anxiety. Physical activities or exercise, in other words, reduce the levels of stress hormones in your body and boost the release of endorphin hormones that improve your mood. You can also manage your underlying triggers for eating emotionally by following an exercise routine.
However, experts suggest adding just slight ones because intense physical activities often cause health issues. If you’re not already used to an exercise routine, start with a slight walk and some gentle stretching for a few minutes. Note the changes in your physical and emotional health after doing these movements.
In addition, certain mindfulness practices including yoga and deep breathing exercises also offer benefits in reducing stress. Yoga is a highly recommended product to lower their levels of stress and anxiety.
Keep Tracking Your Appetite
It is often not easy to notice what physical and emotional hunger feel like. If you had been following special diet plans on and off, you may not tune into your hunger and fullness cues. But if you want to learn what are the emotional reasons for random eating, you must be aware of physical hunger cues.
Salient symptoms of physical hunger include:
- A drop in energy level.
- Changes in mood.
- Feeling shaky or lightheaded.
- Increase in thoughts about food.
- Stomach grumbling.
Reconnect with your fullness and number by making a clear sketch of your hunger on a one to ten scale.
Once you start scaling your hunger level, you may notice that extreme hunger denotes level one. At this stage you feel extremely weak and physically unwell. You are ready to grab anything that might be edible. While level ten stands for extreme fullness, just like a feel after taking a giant holiday meal. Track your natural pattern of hunger and fullness by making a point of checking in with yourself every few hours.
As you become an expert in practice, you may notice some signs of hunger easily before time. It also helps you identify the situations where you feel like eating but you’re not physically hungry.
Banish Distractions
Rain also has sensations about fullness but it gets distracted when you keep eating while watching TV. Your brain misses out its fulling sensation due to poor attention towards food. So, it is necessary to pay full attention to your food while you’re eating. The focus on food also increases your enjoyment and taste of food. After having a good meal, you may feel satisfied and don’t think about anything else afterwards. But when you’re distracted, you may also start eating fastly and unconsciously. Your stomach starts to struggle to let your brain know you’re full. Fast eating makes your ear more than what your body needs before your brain decides to tell you to stop.
Stimulus control is the most recommended behavioral strategy to manage this condition but it needs to change your food cues.
Seek Professional Support
Sadness and stress are tough feelings to navigate alone on your own. You can resist these emotional disasters by seeking support from a professional therapist or from your near ones. For example, a five minute talk on the phone with your friend can release your stress. Talking and spending time with your beloved family member can bring wonderful changes to your mood. However, informal professional support groups are also available for your help.
According to studies, social support and accountability help you greatly in making changes to your eating behaviors. Several organizations are working to educate people how overeating leads to emotional eating. This allergy can turn into compulsive overeating or eating disorders.
In addition, many online websites are offering help to manage emotional eating disorders by identifying the triggers.
Conclusion
Emotional eating often becomes a part of eating disorders. Stressful situations trigger it. Making changes to your lifestyle can help manage the condition. Diagnosis of eating disorders is not tough but it’s necessary to avoid more eating issues in future. If left untreated they cause obesity and other underlying health issues.
Be brave to ask for help if you’re struggling with uncomfortable eating. Talk to your healthcare provider about your concerns. Connecting with a dietitian or mental health professional also helps manage emotional eating including its physical and mental aspects.
